Monthly Archives: March 2017

Some time ago in our post about the fastest-growing industries, we found that the only industry that didn’t see a decline in employment numbers in 2008 was healthcare. Thanks to this fact, the industry has seen the largest growth since 2000, creating almost 30 percent more jobs by 2012.

One particularly interesting thing you can learn from the County Business Patterns data is the distribution of establishments by size. Of course, such distribution would significantly depend on the industry — you are unlikely to find any small businesses among hospitals or schools. But many types of businesses, like graphic or interior design services, are usually very small.

Any lending (and especially peer-to-peer) is inherently associated with substantial financial risks. But sometimes it looks like the borrower didn’t make any serious effort to repay the loan, defaulting just months after the origination date.

Today we will take a look at the number of early delinquencies among all loans issued through Prosper, one of the two major peer-to-peer lending marketplaces in the U.S. For the purpose of this post, we consider a loan to end with an early delinquency if it was charged off less than one year after the origination date.

When planning a trip around the U.S. or abroad, we often consider airlines as a method of transportation. Everyone has their own requirements when choosing airline; seat availability, ticket price, leg room or food choices can be seen as major factors. If you are planning a business trip, things like punctuality and proper baggage handling become more important.

In this series of posts, we examine the peer-to-peer lending industry, which experienced a rapid growth during the last few years. The two major sites, Lending Club and Prosper both provide the loan data.

Using the U.S. Census Bureau County Business Patterns data, we can take a deeper look at how the business profiles of different U.S. regions have changed in the recent years. In this post, we focus on the industry sectors in the Midwest.

Including a number sequence or a year in your login or account name is quite popular — it is even suggested by some websites in case the desired name is occupied. Following our posts on the 10 million passwords dataset, we now explore different digit sequences that occur in passwords.

The United States has an extensive airline transportation network. According to statistics from Airports Council International, 12 of the world’s largest airports by passenger traffic are located in the U.S. In fact, the world’s busiest airport is Hartsfield–Jackson in Atlanta, Georgia. More than 100 million passengers went through this airport in 2015, a 5.5 percent increase from previous year.

The Num-Powers-Boyd score measures occupational status based on median education levels and median incomes of individuals. An intuitive interpretation of the score of an occupation is the percentage of the population having an occupation with education and income levels below that occupation. This score weights education and income contribution equally. Although the use of such indices is still a topic of discussion among professional sociologists, this simple and clear interpretation can be understood by everyone.

In a previous post, we used this measure to examine occupation rankings through time. Today we will look at the scores of different demographic groups. This time we also use data provided by Minnesota Population Center and IPUMS.

According to the United States Census Bureau data for 2008-2012, more than half of all Americans commute to work every working day. Personal cars and public transportation are not the only modes of commuting, but they are the most popular. Year by year, walking and riding a bicycle are becoming more and more popular, and the corresponding infrastructure is developing rapidly. One can agree that walking and bicycling have a few advantages over motorized travel. They are healthier, ecologically pure and require less expensive infrastructure than other commuting modes. Of course, the distribution of the number of pedestrians and bicyclists in the states is not uniform. The city with the highest percentage of walkers is Ithaca, NY. Portland, OR has the highest percentage of bicyclists.